Mark Bostridge has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 17 narrators. The most-rated is Letters from a Lost Generation.
Vera Brittain and the First World War
Summary
Vera Brittain and the First World War tells the remarkable story of the author behind Testament of Youth while charting the book's ascent to become one of the most loved memoirs of the First World War period. Such interest is set to expand even more in this centenary year of the war's outbreak. In the midst of her studies at Oxford when war broke out across Europe, Vera Brittain left university in 1915 to become a VAD (voluntary aid detachment) nurse. There she treated soldiers in London, Malta, and Etaples. The events of the First World War were to have an enormous impact on her life. Four of Brittain's closest friends, including her fiancé, Roland Leighton, and her brother, Edward Brittain, MC, were killed in action, sparking a lifelong commitment to pacifism. In 1933 she published Testament of Youth, the first of three books dealing with her experience of war. In equal measures courageous, tragic, and deeply fascinating, Testament of Youth is one of the most compelling and important works of war literature ever to have been written by a British woman. Mark Bostridge's Vera Brittain and the First World War, published to coincide with the film of Testament of Youth, explores the effects of the First World War on Vera Brittain both in terms of her personal life and in terms of its effect on her development as a writer and her eventual decision to become a pacifist.
©2014 Mark Bostridge (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Letters from a Lost Generation
Summary
A selection of the powerful and poignant wartime letters of Vera Brittain and her friends.
"If war spares me," wrote Vera Brittain to her brother, Edward, in 1916, "it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four." Seventeen years later, Vera was to achieve her aim with the acclaimed Testament of Youth.
This series of letters was the inspiration behind Testament. Written between Vera; her brother; her fiancé, Roland Leighton; and their two best friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, they give a unique perspective on the most horrifying conflict the world has ever seen. They show the heartbreaking disillusionment of an idealistic public-school generation, raised on ideas of patriotism and duty, as the reality of war emerged. Yet they also give a fascinating insight into the era as a whole: their generation’s literary tastes and the place of women in society.
Read by Amanda Root, Jonathan Firth, Rupert Graves, James Wallace, and Robert Portal, and first heard on BBC Radio 4, these deeply moving letters let us hear for ourselves the voices of Vera Brittain’s lost generation.
©2014 BBC Worldwide Ltd (P)2014 BBC Worldwide Ltd